Pitchfork

San Diego's Drive Like Jehu were always Old Testament kinda guys: locusts, rats, frogs-- you name it, they could summon it forth from their amps with a simple touch of pick to string if you claimed to worship any Band before them. Now, hardness of that scale can tend to push a group toward the fringe, but for DLJ, it led to indecent propositions from Interscope, an improbably good album (you know, the one you're reading about), and, even more improbably, a place in the indie rock canon that seems to have been progressively solidifying since the moment they split up. Post-unfortunate-breakup, things seemed to be going pretty well for the ex-band and their opus, until the illusion of major-label visibility caught up to them. Without a moneymaker to shake, Yank Crime fell through the slit in Interscope's big dollar-sign sack and into the proverbial cracks. Fortunately, Jehu's John Reis hates out-of-printness like Yahweh hates a sinner, and so, thanks to a reissue on his own Swami label, Yank Crime broke the "obscure classic" yoke for good this past November.

Rick Froberg and John Reis, of course, are well-rooted in indie history. Prior to forming Drive Like Jehu, they had a band called Pitchfork (no relation); while playing with DLJ, Reis fronted (and continues to front) Rocket from the Crypt; and more recently, the pair begat Hot Snakes. So why Yank Crime should be singled out from the continuity of the duo's output is a perfectly reasonable question. It'd be bullshit to claim that DLJ's dalliance in time signatures gave them any great intellectual edge over their relations; in fact, the aim with this record (and to a lesser extent, the duo's similarly awesome debut) was to see just how messy math could get. "Luau", a solid 9\xBD minutes of shifting, epic muck in the middle of the album, is a strong contender for that (or any) crown. Somehow, though, it's still a sing-along, with Froberg and Thingy's Rob Crow exchanging weird, plaintive, and perfectly placed cries of "Aloha! Suit up!" Same goes for the sprawling "Do You Compute": Every shard of feedback, icy harmonic blast, and doomed-out power chord refers back to and revolves around Froberg's desperate repetition of the titular mantra.

So, could be it's the tunes. Opening an album with a song as bracingly great as "Here Come the Rome Plows" would be a shot in the foot for almost any other band, with its snakepit verses and a chorus that goes from balled-up fists to open arms and back again before you can take a breath. "Golden Brown" does the same in almost half the time. These more straightforward songs sting like snowballs packed with rock-hard chunks of melody, and in each case, Froberg's voice abrades the solid lines down to the bare minimum, and the band fills in the resulting space with pure venom. It's often easy to forget that DLJ were considered emo in their day; Froberg's howls of "Ready, ready to let you in!" on "Super Unison" seem like a sick parody of stylish vulnerability. Then the song mutates into a gorgeous, snare-drum rolling open sea, and everything you've ever liked (and still like) about this genre in its purest form comes flooding back.

Maybe it's that openness in spite of everything else that keeps bringing me back to Yank Crime. The unexpectedly delicate instrumental (now standard on most albums in the artsy-hard mode) "New Intro" drops the standoffishness for a minute or two before buzzing off in feedback, but the tactics are pretty much the same as on the rest of the album. You feel like something transcendentally wonderful is at the bottom of this shark tank; even if it means turning to chum, you can't help diving in.

The reissue is, predictably, a little reticent with regard to bonus material, but it does include another out-of-print artifact (the 1992 "Hand over Fist/Bullet Train to Vegas" single), as well as the "original version" of the album closer "Sinews". It's hard to see the harmonic "Yeah!"s and the shouted chorus of "Hand over Fist" as anything but Nirvanic (maybe that's what turned Interscope's collective head), while the straight thrash of "Bullet Train to Vegas" sounds more elemental. Both are catchy as hell and interesting as precursors; still, the hooks don't quite sink as deep. The revelatory new "Sinews", however, strips a few more layers off of the already raw album version, and the resulting bedroom angst is, disarmingly, almost cozy. Froberg's distant vocals and the band's narcoleptic start/stop timing tempt your ears closer and closer to the speakers; each time they blast you away, it's done with the cruel confidence of a band who's always known you'll be coming back for more.